Fight, Flight, or Freeze: Releasing Organizational Trauma
summary
Organizations respond to incidents like organisms experiencing fight, flight, or freeze: severe outages create undischarged traumatic stress that leaves teams hyper‑aroused or shut down, shrinking capacity to change. Concrete practices reset the organizational nervous system: run game days and planned failure injection (PagerDuty’s Failure Fridays) as low‑stress rehearsals, treat after‑action reviews as stories via blameless postmortems, collect contributing factors instead of hunting “root cause” during an incident, and avoid cognitive distortions that harden defensive behavior.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:18Content Warning: Discussion of trauma and post- traumatic stress
- 3:45Humans are not zebras
- 4:40Animals in the wild are not traumatized by routine threats to their lives, while humans, on the other hand, are readily overwhelmed and often subject to the traumatic symptoms of hyper arousal, shutdown and dysregulation.
- 6:58Nuanced
- 9:14How does this apply to an organization?
- 10:27Hyperarousal fight or flight
- 13:10Inappropriate response
- 15:22Identify your organization's window of tolerance
- 18:12Organizational EMDR
- 18:24Game days
- 19:58Planned failure injection
- 22:01Process failure
- 23:56A word about somatic experiencing
- 25:24Cognitive distortions
- 25:55Polarized thinking
- 26:14Overgeneralization
- 26:35Fortune telling
- 27:15Control fallacies
- 28:06Resilient strength is the opposite of helplessness.
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